Imagination

     Unfortunately, I cannot remember why we were talking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge a few classes ago, but I do remember that we were trying to find the full quote of his "primary imagination" spiel. Well, I found it.

"The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation....it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead." 

      Coleridge goes on to say, "[A poet] diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and...fuses by that synthetic and magical power...the imagination."  One well worded interpretation of this statement, written by Katherine D. Harris, reads as follows, "As soon as the poet decides to write down his or her poem...the work is inevitably diminished." The solidity of the words written remove the idea from pure and perfect imagination and turn the idea into an object, which Coleridge claims is then "fixed and dead." This is all well and good - and true, in my opinion - but Coleridge did not say it first. The following you'll remember from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / a local habitation and a name." -Theseus Act V, Scene 2

     In Theseus speech, Shakespeare claims just the same; the poet turns imagination into object.
     In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein Mary Shelley wrote, "My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings."
     John Cage, primarily a composer, once said, "[Art is] an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living." Or, perhaps, the very dreams we're dreaming? For what is life if not fueled by dreams?
     And finally, Allan Kaprow, a painter from the 50s and 60s, claimed, "'Anything' was too easy....If anything was art, nothing was art."
     So what does all this mean? Why did I decide that all these quotes fit together and create meaning? I have no idea; you tell me.

Sabrina